


Trial by Existence

by OhAine



Series: The Frost Collection [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Altered state of consiousness, Angst, Dark, F/M, Mind Palace, Sherlolly - Freeform, hopeful, mollock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 10:23:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7931044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhAine/pseuds/OhAine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you believe in God, Molly? In Heaven?” He swallows thickly, “Or Hell?” </p><p>“I believe that heaven or hell is what we make for ourselves on Earth. That we choose.” A maelstrom brews in her quiet eyes, and there’s grief in her voice when she says, “You have a choice now, Sherlock.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trial by Existence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icecat62](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icecat62/gifts).



> Gifted to Icecat62, for reasons she already knows.
> 
> Based on 'The Trial by Existence' by the great Robert Frost, and heavily influenced by Huysmans' 'En rade.' As always, I own nothing.
> 
> Beta'd by MaybeItsJustMyType, who has been so patient with this story as it bounced across the ocean these last four months. This is something new for me, and I'm incredibly nervous about it; I honestly wouldn't be posting this without her encouragement.
> 
> Set in Sherlock's mind palace version of John and Mary's wedding venue. This is the second of three related stories.
> 
> Warning! This is tagged as dark for a reason, kittens and rainbows are sadly absent from this story.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a sense of unsettling familiarity to the room, though he has only ever been here once before.

The yellow walls are a dazzling golden hew in the setting sunlight that slants through the windows and fills the room, but they shimmer and pulsate with something that is alive and clawing beneath their surface. It makes him uneasy, anxious. The trellis of branches that adorns the walls seeps with brackish tears, their withered and dead leaves flutter to the floor that shifts beneath his feet, their decaying tendrils stretch out to reach for him.

Fractures have opened in the improbable landscape, a lacework of broken plaster on the walls and ceiling. Through them, he catches glimpses of nameless constellations that shine down on him without light.

Magpies that he’s sure were once painted lapis-blue are now black as night, stark and ugly. Their resin feathers flutter and carry them, swooping from one perch to another about the room, the swarming motions making him dizzy. They are harbingers of…something, though he knows not what.

From a distant past, his mother speaks to him: ‘ _One for sorrow,’_ she whispers.

“Where have you gone to?” Molly’s voice is as soft as the amber flecked eyes filled with love and devotion that watch him curiously. Illuminated, lit from within, her colour and bright energy so often out of place was gloriously right in this room. Dying embers of sunlight catch on the flaxen hues in her hair creating the illusion of a gilded halo that crowns her as though she were an angel.

Beneath the screeches of the painted birds, Sherlock hears the strings of wistful music he long ago composed. The piece is melancholic, filled with longing, written while they were apart when the absence of their intimacy almost…almost…

The memory abandons him when her gentle fingertips brush against his clavicle as her hands come to rest with a delicate pressure on his chest. Though he feels his skin tingle, feels his tense fingers flex and twitch to hold her, the unsteady thrumming of his heart that always, _always_ accompanies her touch is absent. All he feels is an empty chasm beneath his breast bone, where his heart once beat.

“Nowhere,” he says, “I’m here. I’ve always been here.”

Sherlock places his hands over hers, curling his long fingers around her smaller ones to position her left on his right shoulder. Taking her other hand to his lips, he kisses the heel of her palm, then her wrist. For a fleeting moment he worries others will see and know what’s in his heart, but the feeling is already drifting away before he can remember why it doesn’t matter anymore.

Stepping into his arms, Molly - luminous and beautiful - confesses, “I was never much of a dancer.”

As her body presses to his, he loses the thread of music. Something about how they fit together is wrong and disquieting. In that other place, he knows precisely how it should be. _It’s funny,_ he thinks, _how the transport remembers things he once tried so hard to make it forget._

Sherlock shakes his head to clear the fog that has descended over his thoughts. When he looks at her again with eyes that are the colour of a storm at sea he dismisses the idea that there’s something he’s forgotten.

“No my darling, you never were.”

“Not that it mattered to you. You said that what I lacked in talent I made up for in enthusiasm,” she grins at him, affectionately teasing, “though I suspect you only said that to spare my feelings.”

“Nonsense, it was only ever a matter of having the right dance partner.”

Molly sighs and rests her temple against his cheek. He feels her humid breath on his collar: it’s light and startlingly warm against the impermeable chill of his cold skin. She glides effortlessly with him to the sound of a violin that he thinks may be his own, played long ago. There is serenity and peace in her arms, the first he’s felt since…since _when_ exactly, he doesn’t know.

Sherlock breathes deeply and lets the music wash over him as he sways in her tender embrace.  Their empty footsteps silently glide across the floor. It splinters and cracks underfoot, like decaying bones crumbling to dust.

“I’ve always followed where you led,” she whispers, her lips brushing the concavity at the base of his throat, she gazes up through thick lashes to look into his eyes.

Drawing her near as the notes that are filled with longing dip and swell, he says, “But not here. Never here.”

Evening has fallen, and already the sun is setting, the vibrant room growing muted and dim as the violin that aches and yearns becomes more and more distant. Circling around them, the beating wings of the Magpies block the dying sunlight.

“Molly?”

She hums a yes against his neck.

“What happens when the music stops?”

“You’ll go where I can’t follow.”

It’s all so unfair, Sherlock knows. An undeserving man such as he, was allowed to spend the last days of his life with the only woman he has ever truly loved, but sweet, gentle Molly will not spend the rest of hers with him. His cold, still heart aches with love for her.

Exerting just a hint of gentle force, Sherlock lays his lips against Molly’s and kisses her. Their noses brush and he feels the sweep of her lashes against his skin.

It’s hitting him now, and the fathomless pit in his chest gapes hollow. He doesn’t want to go and his not inconsiderable mind can’t assimilate the reality that he is leaving Molly forever. Small dreams of their life are gone, unhonoured promises left behind. These are his final moments with her, so behind his eyelids he tries to memorise her face knowing that it’s futile, and suddenly he feels a dreadful sense of fear.

“Do you believe in God, Molly? In Heaven?” He swallows thickly, “Or Hell?”

“I believe that heaven or hell is what we make for ourselves on Earth. That we choose.” A maelstrom brews in her quiet eyes, and there’s grief in her voice when she says, “You have a choice now, Sherlock.”

Sherlock closes his eyes recalling her tender kisses, so many things about his love for her that he wishes he could never leave. The dichotomy of this truth is that for him and Molly things would never be over, yet here they are, together at the end.

“You will stay with me? Until it’s done?”

“My love,” she whispers sadly, “I will always be with you.” Tears fill her eyes, settling heavily on her lashes. They implore him not to say good-bye.

With a feather-light and trembling touch, Sherlock brushes his thumb under her eye. His lips ghost over her radiant skin, kissing her temple he tells her, “I have always loved you.”

As the music fades to silence, his arms close around emptiness.

“Forgive me, Molly,” he rasps in a voice that’s been scored by a broken heart.

When he opens his eyes again she has gone. The chimerical magpies now fill the silent room and all at once they obscure his vision, the entire room engulfed in an ebony tumult. His body burns with exhaustion, so he accepts the respite the darkness gifts him as it pulls him under. He feels curiously light, as though his bones are hollow like the flock that waits to consume him.

The frantically beating wings that bear him aloft, take terrifying flight. He knows what happens next. He has fallen before, he knows how it feels to plunge over the edge of a precipice and survive.

When he falls this time he is broken, transformed into a thousand onyx birds that join the dark and twisted flock rising from the shadows. Amid the chaos, he is lost in a vast, unlit chasm – swept away on the eastern wind, toward peace and absolution.

Outstretched arms of a shaded form wait to take him. He is almost there. Almost home.

His anxiety stills and he is no longer afraid. In the velvet night a light pierces the blackness, one glimmering star in the ebony harvest that calls to him.

Molly’s lingering disembodied gentle voice does not falter as she tells him, “But always God speaks at the end: ‘One thought in agony of strife, the bravest would have by for friend, the memory that he chose the life.’ ”


End file.
